The jury decided December 23 that fourteen G-men and city cops have to pay $711,937.50. The sum will be divided among seven individual activists and the Washington Peace Center.

The jury found that the FBI and the city’s “Red Squad” had conspired to violate the civil rights of plaintiffs through FBI disruption operations, known as COINTELPRO and city police use of provocateurs.

The decision by the all-Black jury is the most important of its kind to date. Several similar suits have been settled out of court as a result of lawyers’ arguments that such cases can’t be won at trial.  
 
January 21, 1957
In the community of Johannesburg, South Africa, in the month of December, 153 educators, clergymen, writers, and labor and political leaders were arrested en masse in pre-dawn raids. The sole charge against them was that they had been among some 4,000 delegates to a Congress of the People in June 1955, which had proclaimed a ringing Charter of Freedom, proposing the abolition of Apartheid (racial segregation), and popular control of industry, banks, and other socially necessary services.

This round-up of freedom-fighters climaxes the whole policy of the Nationalist government which came to power several years ago, continually increasing the burden of oppression of the eleven million non-white peoples by the two million Europeans, and rejecting all attempts by the Africans to place their grievances before the government.  
 
January 23, 1932
Reports from the mine fields tell of a reestablishment of the influence of the U.M.W.A. in recent months.

The new influx of membership into the union will undoubtedly revive the Left wing within it and open up real possibilities for militant action among the miners on a nation-wide scale.

The present situation in Illinois is surely heading toward another movement that will be fought bitterly. The contract expires March 31, 1932. The Illinois district represents the last semblance of absolute job control in any mining field in the country. We can go farther by saying that it is the last section of the American unskilled working class that has job control. The union is at stake. The miners’ organization in this state will not be fighting for better conditions, nor to hold what it has, but it will fight for its very rights to exist as a union.  
 
 
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